Scaring up an audience in the attention economy

Thousands of lives were consumed by the November terror attacks in Mumbai.

“Wait a second”, you might be thinking. “The attacks were truly
horrific, but all news reports say around two hundred people were killed by the
terrorists, so thousands of lives were definitely not consumed.”

You are right. And you are wrong.

Indeed, around 200 people were murdered by the terrorists in an act of chilling
exhibitionism. And still, thousands of lives were consumed. Imagine that 1
billion people devoted, on average, one hour of their attention to the Mumbai
tragedy: following the news, thinking about it, discussing it with other
people. The number is a wild guess, but the guess is far from a wild number.
There are over 1 billion people in India alone. Many there spent whole days
following the drama. One billion people times one hour is 1 billion hours,
which is more than 100,000 years. The global average life expectancy is today 66 years. So nearly 2,000
lives were consumed by news consumption. It’s far more than the number of
people murdered, by any standards.

In a sense, the newscasters became unwilling bedfellows of the terrorists. One
terrorist survived the attacks, confessing to the police that the original plan
had been to top off the massacre by taking hostages and outlining
demands in a series of dramatic calls to the media. The terrorists wanted
attention. They wanted the newsgatherers to give it to them, and they got it.
Their goal was not to kill a few hundred people. It was to scare billions,
forcing people to change reasoning and behaviour. The terrorists pitched their
story of brutality. Their targets, among them luxury hotels frequented by the
international business community, set the scene for their sick reality show.
Several people in my professional surroundings cancelled business trips to
Mumbai after watching the news. The terrorists succeeded. We must count on more
terror attacks on luxury hotels in the future.

Can the journalists and news organisations who were in Mumbai be blamed for
serving the interests of the terrorists? I think not. They were doing their
jobs, reporting on the big scary event. The audience flocked to their stories.
Their business model - generating and brokering attention - was exploited by
the terrorists. The journalists were working on behalf of the audience, not on
behalf of the terrorists. But that did not change the outcome. The victory of
the terrorists grew with every eyeball that was attracted by the news. Without
doubt, one of the victims was the role of journalism as a non-involved
observer. It got sapped by a paradox. It’s not the first time. Journalism
always follows “the Copenhagen interpretation”
of quantum mechanics: You can’t measure a system without influencing it.

Self reference is a classic dilemma for journalism. Journalism wants to observe, not be an actor. It wants to cover a story without becoming part of it. At the same time it aspires to empower the audience. But by empowering the audience, it becomes an actor on the story. Non-involvement won’t work, it is a self-referential paradox like the Epimenides paradox (the prophet from Crete who said “All Cretans are liars”). The basic self-referential paradox is the liars’ paradox (“This sentence is false”). This can be a very constructive paradox, if taken by the horns. It inspired Kurt Gödel to reinvent the foundation of mathematics, addressing self-reference. Perhaps the principles of journalism can be reinvented, too? Perhaps the paradox of non-involvement can be replaced by ethics of engagement as practiced by, for example, psychologists and lawyers?

While many classic dilemmas provide constant frustration throughout life, this
one is about to get increasingly wicked. Here is why.

It is only 40 years since the birth of collaboration between people sitting
behind computers linked by a network, “the mother of all demos”, when Doug Engelbart and his team at SRI demoed the first computer mouse, interactive text, video
conferencing, teleconferencing, e-mail and hypertext.

Only 40 years after their first demo, and only 15 years after the Internet
reached beyond the walls of university campuses, Doug’s tools are in almost
every home and office. Soon they’ll be built into every cell phone. We are
always online. For the first time in human history, the attention of the whole
world can soon be summoned simultaneously. If we summon all the attention the
human species can supply, we can focus two hundred human years of attention
onto a single issue every single second. This attention comes equipped with
glowing computing power that can process information in a big way. Every human
on the ‘Net is using a computer device able to do millions or billions of
operations per second. And more is to come. New computers are always more
powerful than their predecessors. The power has doubled every two years since
the birth of computers. This is known as Moore’s
Law. If the trend continues for another 40 years, people will be using
computers 1 million times more powerful than today. Try imagining what
you can do with that in your phone or hand-held gaming device! Internet
bandwidth is also booming. Everybody on Earth will have at least one gadget. We
will all be well connected. We will all be able to focus our joint attention,
ideas and computational powers on the same thing. That’s pretty powerful. This
is actually what Doug was facilitating when he dreamed up the Demo. The mouse -
what Doug is famous for today - is only a detail. Doug says we can only solve
the complex problems of today by summoning collective intelligence. Nuclear
war, pandemics, global warming. These are all problems requiring collective
intelligence. The key to collective intelligence is collective attention. The
flow of attention controls how much of our collective intelligence gets
allocated to different things.

When Doug Engelbart’s keynoted the Fourth Conference on
Innovation Journalism he pointed out that journalism is the perception
system of collective intelligence. He hit the nail on the head. When people
share news, they have a story in common. This shapes a common picture of the
world and a common set of narratives for discussing it. It is agenda setting
(there is an established “agenda-setting theory” about
this). Journalism is the leading mechanism for generating collective attention.
Collective attention is needed for shaping a collective opinion. Collective
intelligence might require a collective opinion in order to address collective
issues.

Here is where innovation journalism can
help. In order for collective intelligence to transform ideas into novelties,
we need to be able to generate common sets of narratives around how innovation
happens. How do people and organisations doing different things come together
in the innovation ecosystem? Narratives addressing this question make it
possible for each one of us to relate to the story of innovation. Innovation
journalism turns collective attention on new things in society that will
increase the value of our lives. This collective attention in turn facilitates
the formuation of a collective opinion. Innovation journalism thus connects the
innovation economy and democracy (or any other system of governance).

There is an upside and a downside to everything. We can now summon collective
attention to track the spread of diseases. But we are also more susceptible to
fads, hypes and hysterias. Will our ability to focus collective attention
improve our lives or will we become victims of collective neurosis?

We are moving into the attention economy. Information is no
longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. Some business strategists think
‘attention transactions’ can replace financial transactions as the focus of our
economy. In this sense, the effects on society of collective attention is the macroeconomics of the attention economy. Collective attention is
key for exercising collective intelligence.

This brings us back to Mumbai. How collectively intelligent was it to spend thousands of human lifetimes of attention following the slaughter of hundreds? The jury is out on that one - it depends on the outcome of our attention. Did the collective attention benefit the terrorists? Yes, at least in the short term. Perhaps even in the long term. Did it help solve the situation in Mumbai? Unclear. Could the collective attention have been aimed in other ways at the time of the attacks, which would have had a better outcome for people and society? Yes, probably.

The more wired the world gets, the more terrorism can thrive. When our
collective attention grows, the risk of collective fear and obsession follows.
It is a threat to our collective mental health, one that will only increase
unless we introduce some smart self-regulating mechanisms. These could direct
our collective attention to the places where collective attention would benefit
society instead of harm. Journalism - the professional generator and broker of
collective attention - is a key factor.

The dynamics between terrorism and journalism
is a market failure of the attention
economy.

No, I am not supporting government control over the news. Planned economy has proven to not be a solution for market failures. The problem needs to be solved by a smart feedback system. Solutions may lie in new business models for journalism that provide incentives to journalism to generate constructive and proportional attention around issues, empowering people and bringing value to society. Just selling raw eyeballs or Internet traffic by the pound to advertisers is a recipe for market failure in the attention economy. So perhaps it is not all bad that the traditional raw eyeball business models are being re-examined. It is a good time for researchers to look at how different journalism business models generate different sorts of collective attention, and how that drives our collective intelligence. Really good business models for journalism bring prosperity to the journalism industry, its audience, and the society it works in.

For sound new
business models to arise, journalism needs to come to grips with its inevitable
role as an actor. Instead of discussing why journalists should not get involved
with sources or become parts of the stories they tell, perhaps the solution is
for journalists to discuss why they should get involved.
Journalists must find a way to do so without loosing the essence of journalism.

Ulrik Haagerup
is the leader of the Danish National Public News Service, DR News. He is tired
of seeing ‘bad news makes good news and good news makes bad news’. Haagerup is
promoting the concept of “constructive journalism”, which focuses on
enabling people to improve their lives and societies. Journalism can still be
critical, independent and kick butt.

The key issue Haagerup pushes is that it is not enough to show the problem and
the awfulness of horrible situations. That only feeds collective obsession,
neurosis and, ultimately, depression. Journalism must cover problems from the
perspective of how they can be solved. Then our collective attention can be very
constructive. Constructive journalism will look for all kinds of possible
solutions, comparing and scrutinising them, finding relevant examples and
involving the stakeholders in the process of finding solutions.

I will be working with Haagerup and we will present together with Willi Rütten
of the European Journalism Centre a workshop on ‘constructive innovation
journalism’ at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Summit in 2009.

David Nordfors

David Nordfors is the founding executive director of the VINNOA Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism at Stanford University. The Swede introduced the concept of Innovation Journalism in 2003 and the concept of Attention Work in 2006.